Category: Quotes/Blog

You know that I love a great messing around with words, right? The opening passages from The God of Small Things are just dripping with it. Lots of alliteration, lots of rhyming syllables, lots of repetition of strong sounds and individual letters: K/C, J, F, B. And the sentences oscillate and create a rhythm that is musical!

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpains and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

But by early June the south-west monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. oats ply in the bazaars. And small fishappear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways. (From Page 1 of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Booker prize winner)

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In the excerpt below, I love the space created by a simple change in focus. The grandmother pauses within the story to brush flies from the child’s face, and we just know there is something wrong! Love it.

“The little granddaughter came, picking her way through the long grass. She told the grandmother that the new baby was going to have a bath and she was going to have a bath as well. Her mother had said so.

‘Is mother going to have a bath too?’ the grandmother, brushing flies away from the child’s face, asked.

‘Yes,’ the child told the grandmother. ‘All, her and me and baby.’ The grandmother was surprised….the baby and the granddaughter had been bathed.”

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AS William H Gass was said to be the first to coin the term metafiction, I thought I’d post the paragraph in which he does. It’s from Philosophy and the Form of Fiction, an essay from his 1971 collection, Fiction and the Figures of Life, and he entertains us with a bit of attitude.

There are metatheorems in mathematics and logic, ethics has its linguistic oversoul, everywhere lingos to converse about lingos are being contrived, and the case is no different in the novel. I don’t mean merely those drearily predictable pieces about writers who are writing about what they are writing, but those, like some of the work of Borges, Barth, and Flann O’Brien, for example, in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed. Indeed, many of the so-called antinovels are really metafictions.

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WORKING on my collation of, and obsession with, metafiction written by women, I’ve just now finished reading Jane Eyre. Why it’s taken me so long to get to this wonderful book I don’t know, actually I do know, I started many times but the dated phrasing and the occasional long-winded sentences were a bit of a block. Urged on by my Instagram friends, I dove in and committed to it. So glad I did!

AS far as the meta-fiction classification goes, Jane Eyre comes under the umbrella of a novel where the narrator intentionally exposes herself as the author of the story. This is done in such a delicate and lovely way, simple and engaging. Throughout the book, Jane, our narrator, slips in moments of addressing the reader, many times she calls to our attention by addressing us, “Reader….” and proceeds to tell us something of her intimate thoughts. The most famous, Reader, I married him. It’s delightful and personal, and endears us to her as we become again and again her private confident.

Having read this lovely work, I’m now going on to read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. I’ve read WSS before, but as it’s written as a prequel and response to Jane Eyre, I’m dying to dive back in with a new interest.